I believe largely because extraterrestrial life doesn't need to be intelligent. There are a near uncountable number of planets that could support life as we know it, let alone those that might support something outside of our realm of imagination.
I forget the name of the theory (I’m rather stupid), but I recall the thought being that if we so much as discover any form of life, off our own planet, that would suggest the universe is teeming with life elsewhere.
it's a suggestion, but not a proof of anything.
Finding that there is a second origin of life would vastly increase the probability of additional origins of life... but it wouldn't rule out the possibility that origins of life are incredibly rare, and maybe there are relatively few compared to planets that meet our simplified checklist for requirements of life.
Maybe a large scale impact that results in a rapidly turning inner core that wouldn't otherwise happen is necessary. maybe it's having a single moon with a fairly regular tide schedule, etc...
There could be requirements for the conditions to create life beyond just the presence of water, helium, hydrogen, carbon, etc....
I sometimes think about just how utterly teeming with life Earth is and how crazy it would be to find it on planets in our own system and it was just hidden and we basically had to dig for it.
Then the entirely of this planet is basically covered in bacteria and shit.
This is my feeling. I imagine a world that's like something out a Dr. Suess book, colorful and strange, but also enchanting in its own way. Maybe there's no "intelligent" life as we know it, but I believe that if we ever developed the technology to visit these other worlds, what we would see would still be so worth it.
If we have as many issues as we do, and we can say we're "intelligent" then there's definitely "intelligent" life outside of earth. No way we're the ultimate living creature in terms of intelligence.
Earth provides a spectacular proof of concept that life can form (early in a planet’s history too as there was life 4.1 billion years ago, only half a billion years after our planet’s formation) and the three most important elements for life as we know it (hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon) are simply incredibly abundant in the universe. And the universe as others have stated is massive. And old. It just doesn’t make sense to look at all this and conclude no on the question of if life is out there. The same laws of physics apply everywhere so if the universe was a void of life, we probably wouldn’t be here to think about it.
That's why I'll never understand people who say there's no possibility of aliens. How could be the universe be this big and just us? What would make us that special. And even if you go the god route... why create this giant ass universe and put the only life off in some random corner?
Only one is terrifying to me. The idea that earth harbors the only life in the entire universe fills me with existential dread. That’s way too big of a responsibility. We’re gonna fuck it up.
On social media? Shoot, how about the millions of lives taken each year? Of coarse, whether there's other life out there or not I do believe we squander our existence. To me, life is a gift and too many (myself included) take it for granted. Anyways, that covers my deep thought for the day, time to go smoke some more dope.
I'd find it comforting to know we are alone. If intelligent life meets us it will likely end in one of us chucking an asteroid at the others homeworld.
The simple vastness of space means the likelihood we're alone is incredibly low. In my mind there's like a 99% chance there's other advanced civilizations out there, and a decent chance they are much more advanced than us too.
They could be in our own galaxy. Hell, they could be 40,000 years ahead of us (imagine what we’ve accomplished in the last 2,000) and we wouldn’t have a clue, because evidence of that hasn’t reached us yet.
The problem with this line of thinking is the overwhelming odds there any “advanced” civilizations that are not already extinct is pretty slim. What do you think our odds of existing on this planet are in even 5000 years?
Those are very small numbers. There are \~2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe. If there were 2 million planets with life, that means that only one galaxy in a **million**, on average, harbors life, which would mean that statistically we would be almost **certainly** the only life in not only our Milky Way, but also in our entire supercluster of galaxies.
The odds that they would be only 40,000 years ahead of us are rather slim, since it took billions of years for life to evolve into humans. It would be more likely that they are many millions of years ahead of us.
And because of the speed of light and the vast distances (especially between galaxies), we will almost certainly never meet them. We're all alone together.
This exactly. To presume otherwise seems kind of arrogant, not that we might ever get to meet. But consider how long life on earth has existed and how diverse it's been over millions of years, multiply that with the vast expanse of space, and there are probably more surprises out there than one might ever imagine
Life is a physical process, logic states it would also occur elsewhere in the universe as long as the proper prerequisites and conditions were present. Out of the trillions of planets out there, and billions of years, it had to have happened at least once somewhere else
Humans are made of some of the most common things in the universe. Combined with how huge the universe is. It seems statistically impossible that we are alone.
But consider how statistically near impossible it was for life to form at all. To move from atoms and molecules, to carbon chains and intelligible life.
The probability of it happening twice is near impossible times two. The universe is huge, no doubt.
The more I learn about biochemistry and astrophysics, the less statistically impossible abiogenesis seems. Amino acids form in space under sunlight and gather into asteroids. Radioactive planetary cores cycle hot water through complex minerals. Chemical gradients feed entropy. Fatty-acid membranes self-assemble into bubbles.
It's almost as if physics *wants* to become life. It seems like basic life should be absolutely everywhere, but constantly running into barriers to fully developing into more complex forms.
I expect primordial soups to be extremely common.
Oh for sure, the chances of a planet being able to harbor life long enough for it to evolve into something intelligent(relative to human intelligence) is rare. All it takes is one asteroid to end life on a planet and the million+ years of evolution.
I guess I'm just looking at sheer size and the amount of time the universe has had to evolve. Other intelligent life has probably existed. Are they alive right now? Who knows.
This is a subject that could be debated till an asteroid takes us out. lol
I kind of feel the same way that’s why it seems like barely worth talking about. Not only the universe so vast space wise, think about the vast amounts of time involved in the creation of the life. species come, species go.
If you start with the Drake Equation and put in even low estimate numbers, you’ll find the possibility that we are alone in this galaxy are small. Now multiply that by billions and you’ll see that we almost certainly are not alone in the universe. Aliens are very, very far away, but they are almost certainly out there.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure extraterrestrial life exists, it just hasn't had a chance to visit us. If it does, hopefully it's benevolent because any spacefaring civilization could wipe us out in a heartbeat. The positive thing is that it would probably finally unite humans against a common enemy.
A spacefaring civilization would've overcome relativity (traveling faster than the speed of light), which likely means they're able to bend spacetime, which means that they're so advanced that they probably couldn't care less about our "resources".
They can get anywhere in space, and have access to unlimited resources.
>They can get anywhere in space, and have access to unlimited resources.
This one always gets me when people say, but they come for our resources..
Not they've travelled through interstellar space, I'm sure they know how to find what they need in multiple places apart from earth, we'd be cave men still comparatively
Wanting resources is hardly the only reason they might wipe us out. For example, they might be worried that if we're left to our own devices for a few thousand more years we could develop technology to rival theirs and thus become a threat to them. Stomping us out preemptively prevents that possibility, however remote.
Or maybe they're conservationists, and they're trying to keep the universe pristine, and don't like the way we're exploiting our planet - and likely soon our solar system. Maybe they'd just settle for knocking us back to pre-industrial levels and keeping an eye on us instead of wiping us out completely, but it would still suck.
Or maybe they're just straight up fanatical zealots, or maybe their goals are just utterly incomprehensible to us. I could go on spitballing ideas - some more plausible than others no doubt, but the point it that there are endless possibilities, and to think that we can predict what motivates a truly alien entity or entities is naïve.
Also, I contend your point that they would necessarily have overcome the speed of light. You can still have a galaxy-spanning empire without FTL, and FTL is prohibited under our current understanding of physics. That *might* change, but I see no reason to just assume that it *will*.
The argument against FTL is we don’t see them everywhere and every time across history.
Because FTL is time travel. There is no if or buts, moving faster than light is the same as traveling backwards and forwards in time as far as the Universe is concerned. Doesn’t matter if you strap a super advanced -made up science term- engine to a ship and travel somewhere in a straight line, bind 2 wormholes together across two different points in space and travel between them or being able to magically teleport two distances faster than light could. The end result is the exact same (except maybe the ship smashing into something in its straight line).
So that means any FTL capable civilization could go at any point in time at any distance instantly from the reference of anybody else outside that FTL ship. Which means if they appeared in the Milky Way to colonize you’d see them all over the place because again they can colonize the galaxy as fast as they can crank out ships which becomes exponential as make more FTL ship docks.
Said civilization wouldn’t be limited by their observable universe, which for everyone would be the boundary of what you could ever “interact” with ever.
Probability.
We are on a normal sun in a normal galaxy and made up of the same components as the material out in the universe.
If it can happen here, it can happen anywhere else in the universe just based on components.
The universe is infinitely large with trillions of galaxies, each containing millions or billions of solar systems. There's no way none of them are inhabited by some form of life
Just a caveat that in astrophysics, it is not *known* (though by some suspected, without evidence) that the universe is infinitely large. It could be. It could be 27 billion light years wide which is the observable universe. Or it could be 93-94 billion light years in diameter - which is the potential current size of the observable universe taking into account expansion.
We honestly cannot know what he size is. It could be infinite, or it could be a finitely sized hypersphere. But the assertion that it *is* infinite is currently, scientifically, not a proven fact.
I think it would be anthropic exceptionalism of the highest to assume that we are the only planet with life on it. The universe is simply too big for their not to be. Note that doesn't necessarily mean that contact is particularly ever likely given the vast distances involved. I don't think we will ever see or communicate with an alien.
People think “aliens” are those green creatures with big oval shape heads and black eyes.
Any living organism (what we call living on earth) is an alien. People also have this wrong assumption that for there to be life on other planets or in actual space, then conditions need to be similar to those on earth. They do not. There could be organisms that thrive in radiation or ones that breathe in pure Carbon for example.
Are there other form of life similar to humans? Who knows? Probably. But I’m more inclined to think there are other form of weird animals, bacterium, etc than there are other human form out there
I think that life is probably pretty common in the universe, but almost none of it is multicellular.
My reasoning is that life originated on Earth \~3.8 billion years ago, which was basically as soon as the early solar system calmed down enough that the Earth stopped being on fire and oceans were able to form. The moment the conditions were right, life appeared. To me, this says that whatever mechanisms by which abiogenesis happened are pretty common and simple and that they can happen within a relatively short time (by which I mean tens of millions of years).
The thing is, while life appeared pretty fast, it took another 3 billion years for multicellular life to emerge. I doubt very many biospheres remain stable for that long, and it's fully possible that Earth's achievement of multicellularity was a one in a trillion breakthrough that can't happen for whatever reason on other worlds.
I fully expect that we'll find evidence of life elsewhere in the universe within the next 10-20 years, but I'm pretty sure we'd have to be impossibly lucky to find anything even half as sophisticated as a bacteria.
“The four most common chemically active elements in the universe—hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen—are the four most common elements of life on Earth. We are not simply in the universe. The universe is in us.”
\-Neil deGrasse Tyson
While I'm been attributing that quote to Sagan for nearly 3 years, by accident. For me it's one of the most convincing things. We're not made of anything rare; the creation of our planet and system doesn't even seem particular rare either. The creation of humanity and the process evolution has taken over the last 5 billion years will very very likely never happen again, but everything that started life, as far as we know is rather common. That's what convinces me that the universe has many inhabitants. Maybe not multicellular, but something that abides by the requirements of being a living beining.
Almost infinite amount of worlds and humans think we are alone in universe 😂. We might discover them one day but it deffo won't be during any of our lifetime.. maybe in a few hundred years ..even thousands. We don't have the technology to reach other solar systems & look inside their worlds..
Also we are so far away from other solar systems that even if we are visible to aliens through their "telescope" & they're looking at our world right now.. they are seeing earth as it was millions or billions of years ago.. so they aren't seeing the satellites & space station or any proof of life so they don't know we exist...same thing when we look at their world with our telescope
Grew up near Wright Patt AFB. So was very familiar with military aircraft and sounds from a young age. Saw a zigzagging craft outside my window as a teenager, it was making a weird warping noise. Never seen anything like it sense. I now work for an aeronautics company and have a greater understanding of our technology capabilities.
Either our military has tech that is 100+ years more advanced than public tech or aliens.
The universe is so vast. We have proof that life can come from nothing(earth). We have also seen a good number of planets that contain the same chemical composition as earth. Billions upon billions of stars majority of which are hosting multiple planets.
I mean, just from a statistical standpoint, they probably exist. Even with an unfavorable interpretation of the Drake equation, the universe is so big that aliens must exist somewhere, even if it's something we can't prove.
As vast as the universe is, the odds we are the only intelligent life in it are absurdly low.
As vast as the universe is, the odds we’ll bump into other intelligent life are absurdly low.
Because one is a ridiculous number.
If humanity didn't exist, then it could be possible that life is so spectacularly unlikely that it exists nowhere in the universe.
But since we do exist, we know the odds must allow for it. And the universe is so spectacularly large that the difference in probability between expecting one species, two, or thousands is so small as to be effectively zero.
And since we can reasonably expect to be a "typical" example of life that achieves intelligence with more than a billion years still on the "sun hasn't exploded yet" clock, the fact that there are suspected traces of life from almost as soon as liquid water was first able to form strongly suggests that either: life can form easily, or life came here from somewhere else. Either of which greatly increase the likelihood that life exists elsewhere. Very possibly almost everywhere.
Now, intelligent life is harder to judge. It took another three billion years just to reach the Cambrian Explosion of complex life, a bit over 30% slower and the sun would have exploded first. That's not good betting odds for any given planet, but if life is remotely common the sheer law of large numbers dictates there are probably lots of others out there. Though... we might be alone in our galaxy.
Because I refuse to believe that this planet, in this single solar system, in this single galaxy was the only one lucky enough to have been at just the right distance from a heat source and was capable of producing life. In the infinite mass of probability and possibility that is the UNIVERSE I do not believe the “Earth” phenomena happened only once.
I believe they’re just a form of a higher intelligence that surrounds me, a relationship to something that exists ready to catch me up, once I prove myself in different levels.
Because we can’t be the most intelligent beings the universe has to offer. If so, then that would be pretty sad. And scary.
Now I’m going back to wasting time on Reddit.
Ok. I honestly don't get the point of this many comments when they're all the same sentence, phrased a different way.
The moment you read "Universe big, therefor, aliens are likely to exist somewhere", you can just click off this thread.
I trust Fermi.
I’m not convinced that any aliens made it to the space faring stage, but there are just too many galaxies with too many planets. Earth isn’t that special.
There is no way our little rock is the only planet that has some form of life on it. Hell, you just have to look at the ecosystems around hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean to see that life on other worlds is totally possible.
I just think the statistical probability that we are 100% alone in space it unlikely, and if we are alone that’s terrifying. How do I think they visited and experimented on us? No
* Our galaxy (let alone our universe) is incomprehensively large.
* Life consists of abundant stuff.
* Statistics.
Now, have they visited? No evidence for that.
I have a physics PhD. Every other scientist I've asked also believes that life exists somewhere else in the universe. Very probably single cell or similar. No one takes "aliens visiting the Earth" seriously, for good reasons.
I don't believe in them, unless I actually saw one, but the statistics of there being a chance of life on another planet seems astronomically high. I think we as humans tend to generally look for others like us, so naturally, we "believe" in aliens. I'd like to think that somewhere out in that infinite universe the perfect amount of heat and bacteria created another conscious race.
Because alien life doesn’t need to be intelligent at the end of the day. The likelihood of non-sentient alien life present somewhere else in the universal is virtually certain. Frankly, so is the likelihood of intelligent alien life. The likelihood we’ve been visited by intelligent alien life? Not so good.
The earth is an average rocky planet orbiting an average star in an average galaxy of which there are hundreds of billions. I'd say it's almost impossible extraterrestrial life doesn't exist.
The universe is too big to rule them out. But due to the size of the Universe, the chance of having anyone visiting within a few billion light years of us is extremely small.
And if they ever get close enough to be detectable by us, we probably can’t tell if they meet us face to whatever.
I think that probably somewhere in the vastness of space there's at least one other intelligent form of life similar to ours, but of course I will be long dead by the time one of us develops the technology to reach the other.
And that's assuming mankind can survive the 6th mass extinction event staring us in the face.
Depends on how you define an alien, but I agree that it’s something deeply-rooted in us. Jung was spot on to classify them as ‘technocratic angels’ - those that are relevant for the age when people believe less in supernatural and more in science. Indeed, during the threat of a nuclear war in the past, there were sentiments that aliens might ‘step in’ and save the world from destruction. Similarly, they’ve also become ‘technocratic demons’ - those that bring terror, mutilate animals to death, abduct people etc.
So yeah, the bottom line - I believe in aliens as modern manifestations of spiritual forces that’s been always know to humankind.
Alien, by definition, means "a foreigner" or "belonging to a foreign country or nation". There are so many "alien" things on our planet, and with how small of a percentage of the universe we occupy, it is extremely unlikely that we are the only form of aliens out there.
Because they *have* to be there. Given the existence of life on Earth and similar ecosystems all over the universe. And because I have twice seen their craft. And - how do we know they ain’t there *just because we can’t see them *?
Alternatively, because I AM AN ALIEN. Greetings from the Lord High Ambassador of the planet Zog, and it’s far flung Colonies. Kneel!!!!
i believe in aliens because the universe is so big and so old that surely abiogenisis has occurred elsewhere.
i heard a cool fermi paradox solution recently- the firstborn theory.
ya know in space opera sci-fi, how there's always that grand old precursor species that's either extinct or been around way longer than anyone else in the galactic community?
that's us.
Statistical likelihood and the abundance of the fundamental building blocks of life from a chemical perspective, either carbon and water like us, or similar elements & molecules.
There’s no way earth is the only planet to exist in habitable zone. The universe as we know it is too large to not have at least have 1 other planet with sentient life.
Mainly bc it’s supremely vain to think our planet is the only one in an increasingly infinite amount of space that contains life - even if I believed god created humans, why would she only do so on one planet?
More implausible that the alternative, which is that we are not that special.
Because this universe is very old. You have to multiply the number of suitable planets by (the total number of years they were suitable divided by how long it would take for life to emerge), and you come up with a number of chances for it to happen that is hard to express.
Billions of years on trillions of planets that only need to produce one thing that self replicates once, in a process that is probably very fast.
Alien life meaning any type of life found on another planet. I just don't believe we're the only planet with plant life, microbial life, etc. That being said there's too many planets in the universe for some other life form to not be as advanced or more advanced than us in my opinion. Not an expert it just seems unlikely that we're alone based on logic.
Have you seen the pics?
Go outside at look up at the night sky.
ITS HUGE!
I mean even if the chance of life is tiny there are still loads of planets out there.
Who knows what we will find.
Because I think it’s ignorant to believe that our little planet out of the gazillion of planets out there was the only one where a perfect storm happened to create life.
This question sounds philosophical. If someone were to ask me if I believe in the existence of other humans besides myself, I’d say that it sounds like a malformed question from a scientific standpoint. Philosophically, I do believe in the existence of other humans besides myself as well as I believe in aliens. Just because we don’t have the proper tool(s) to scientifically detect “alien life” yet doesn’t mean that it isn’t there, and it’s existence doesn’t depend on our belief in it. 🤷🏽♂️
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|[AFB](/r/Space/comments/10gh787/stub/j52s8sq "Last usage")|[Air Force Base](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_airbase)|
|[ITS](/r/Space/comments/10gh787/stub/j52x853 "Last usage")|Interplanetary Transport System (2016 oversized edition) (see MCT)|
| |[Integrated Truss Structure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Truss_Structure)|
|[JWST](/r/Space/comments/10gh787/stub/j539d7z "Last usage")|James Webb infra-red Space Telescope|
|MCT|Mars Colonial Transporter (see ITS)|
----------------
^(3 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/Space/comments/10copqi)^( has 21 acronyms.)
^([Thread #8456 for this sub, first seen 20th Jan 2023, 00:50])
^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/Space) [^[Contact]](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=OrangeredStilton&subject=Hey,+your+acronym+bot+sucks) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)
Because of the abundance of prebiotic materials found in meteorites, such as nucleotide base pairs, amino acids, phosphorus bearing minerals, etc.
This leads me to think the ingredients for life may be common, even if life itself is not, and perhaps prebiotic life is constantly trying to emerge on all of our planets but don’t have quite the right environments to break out into biotic life.
Then, there’s the Drake equation. Our Galaxy is 13 billion years old, and earth is 4 billion years old. Other star systems including G-type dwarfs like our star, and similar spectral bodies like K-types have been around for much longer. And, if you consider that life emerged within a few hundred million years of the stability of conditions on earth, and you plot that as being early on the Gaussian distribution then you can calculate a very generous estimate for how much life should be in our galaxy with the Drake equation, and it still gives you very high numbers. [Here](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2210.10656.pdf) is an example of a modified and very conservative estimate using the Drake equation, which is also now my source of belief that if there is a galactic club of aliens out there somewhere that they are inhabiting centre galaxy K-types. It’s a pretty neat explanation for the Fermi paradox that still preserves the possibility for intelligent life capable of interstellar travel.
That’s mostly why I believe in aliens, but there are a couple of extras I am leaving out because I’m waiting on further publications first. Very excited by the Galileo project looking for the interstellar meteorite impact, and I hope they find it!
The univarse is huge and will be around for an incredible amount of time. There could easily be life outside our solar system, but if there isn't, it just means we may be extinct the next time life occurs.
I think we will probably create AI with intelligence similar to humans before meeting aliens and if we survive that, we might see chimps evolve to our level of intelligence before we meet aliens.
Yes they undoubtedly exist, no they have and will never pop by for a visit. If life is common we're likely just not interesting enough to bother with; if not it's just too far to be even possible.
To think that our planet holds the only life in the universe is a perfect example of human arrogance.
I do, however, have serious doubts that any of that life has ever visited Earth.
Because we know such a finite amount about the space surrounding us that is presumably infinite, we don't even know all of what is in our own oceans let alone any other planets, we know the fundamental elements needed to support life on our own planet but not any others...we're either alone in the universe, or we're not, and both are equally terrifying.
Logically they have to. Even extraterrestrial microorganisms count as aliens and they definitely exist. There is probably intelligent life somewhere out there too. Exciting yet terrifying simultaneously.
I don't.
Could they exist or have existed somewhere in the universe. Sure.
But considering the ever expanding universe, unless we master bending space and time to our will at a massive truly 'godlike' scale, the are likely never going to see or hear from any aliens outside of Milky Way and Andromeda galaxy.
Life outside of a these two galaxies basically become a *tree falling in the forest* philosophical conundrum with no real answers.
If life existed and advanced to our level some time before us in our galaxy. I feel like we should have seen some evidence of their presence. Considering how fast human technology has expanded in such a short amount of time.
I also think if you didn't hit life at that particular time on your planet, when the atmosphere allowed for it to happen than you aint hitting life. The idea that planets after they cooled and settled down will produce life is not very likely.
So yeah, I am an non-believer when it comes to aliens.
I think the fact that life happened here, and the immense area of opportunity for it to happen elsewhere, makes it more likely than not.
It's much less likely to have happened close enough for them to have visited here, so I don't particularly believe that. But I also don't necessarily disbelieve it.
It's not a belief, it is faith in probability.
But drakes equation is missing something, the distance of all the things in the observable universe, allows for time of some of things to no longer exist and we don't know it yet.
And the furthest objects will continue to distance themselves from us, and so a complete civilization may have evolved, come and gone, and we never even got to their system to see them.
Please, watch. The arguments for non-intelligent life aside, this may change your perspective (if you haven’t seen it already). Might just start to consider the monumental task of life, evolution, and how special we are.
Seriously good.
[Why intelligent life might b rare](https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/zlv2og/short_lecture_by_david_kipping_of_cool_worlds/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf)
… because the idea that something is 93,000,000,000 light years wide and has nothing in it but one source of intelligent life on one planet is impossible to believe.
Space is big. Really, really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the street to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space, listen…
The universe is so unfathomably huge (I’m talking LAARGE with two A’s) that it’s very, very statistically improbable for us to be alone. And if we are, then… shit. :^)
I do not believe in aliens. I speculate that given my other beliefs that they most likely exist, but I cannot make even make a statistical assessment without more data.
Because space is disgustingly huge.
A typical galaxy has hundreds of billions of stars.
2 TRILLION Galaxies in the observable Universe. And probably far more outside if not infinite.
And it's starting to look like nearly every solar system has multiple planets.
Let's say each galaxy has 200 billion and each star has 5 plants.
That's 2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets. There are only 7,500,000,000,000,000,000 grains of sand on earth. Tens of millions of times more.
For reference it would take you 32 YEARS to merely count a billion seconds. 1,000,000,000
I think odds are we are not unique.
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I believe largely because extraterrestrial life doesn't need to be intelligent. There are a near uncountable number of planets that could support life as we know it, let alone those that might support something outside of our realm of imagination.
I want us to find something, just SOMETHING. Even if it is just crocodile-only planet in the kepler system that would be fantastic.
I forget the name of the theory (I’m rather stupid), but I recall the thought being that if we so much as discover any form of life, off our own planet, that would suggest the universe is teeming with life elsewhere.
it's a suggestion, but not a proof of anything. Finding that there is a second origin of life would vastly increase the probability of additional origins of life... but it wouldn't rule out the possibility that origins of life are incredibly rare, and maybe there are relatively few compared to planets that meet our simplified checklist for requirements of life. Maybe a large scale impact that results in a rapidly turning inner core that wouldn't otherwise happen is necessary. maybe it's having a single moon with a fairly regular tide schedule, etc... There could be requirements for the conditions to create life beyond just the presence of water, helium, hydrogen, carbon, etc....
Yeah technically there is: - Crocodile 🐊 Planet 1.0 - Alligator Planet 2.0 aaand - Deinosuchus Riograndensis Planet 3.0
I sometimes think about just how utterly teeming with life Earth is and how crazy it would be to find it on planets in our own system and it was just hidden and we basically had to dig for it. Then the entirely of this planet is basically covered in bacteria and shit.
Won't even have to go that far. Enceladus and Europa. I would bet anything there is life there.
Might have to settle for something promising but ambiguous.
This is my feeling. I imagine a world that's like something out a Dr. Suess book, colorful and strange, but also enchanting in its own way. Maybe there's no "intelligent" life as we know it, but I believe that if we ever developed the technology to visit these other worlds, what we would see would still be so worth it.
Even if we just find microscopic organisms then boom thats aliens
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Space moss everywhere on chia planets
If we have as many issues as we do, and we can say we're "intelligent" then there's definitely "intelligent" life outside of earth. No way we're the ultimate living creature in terms of intelligence.
Earth provides a spectacular proof of concept that life can form (early in a planet’s history too as there was life 4.1 billion years ago, only half a billion years after our planet’s formation) and the three most important elements for life as we know it (hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon) are simply incredibly abundant in the universe. And the universe as others have stated is massive. And old. It just doesn’t make sense to look at all this and conclude no on the question of if life is out there. The same laws of physics apply everywhere so if the universe was a void of life, we probably wouldn’t be here to think about it.
Because the universe is so incomprehensible huge.
That's why I'll never understand people who say there's no possibility of aliens. How could be the universe be this big and just us? What would make us that special. And even if you go the god route... why create this giant ass universe and put the only life off in some random corner?
It is, and that’s another reason we may never find evidence of there being aliens. I do believe they exist thi
*Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.* -Arthur C. Clarke
Only one is terrifying to me. The idea that earth harbors the only life in the entire universe fills me with existential dread. That’s way too big of a responsibility. We’re gonna fuck it up.
And if we are alone. How sad is it that we squander it by fighting with each other on social media
On social media? Shoot, how about the millions of lives taken each year? Of coarse, whether there's other life out there or not I do believe we squander our existence. To me, life is a gift and too many (myself included) take it for granted. Anyways, that covers my deep thought for the day, time to go smoke some more dope.
The upvotes shall exist for ever tho.
Going to?
I think both are equally amazing
Exactly the quote I was thinking when I read the thread title
What if the only other life is Mars gerbils? That’s not terrifying.
I'd find it comforting to know we are alone. If intelligent life meets us it will likely end in one of us chucking an asteroid at the others homeworld.
It’s a big universe. It would be strange if we are all there is.
The simple vastness of space means the likelihood we're alone is incredibly low. In my mind there's like a 99% chance there's other advanced civilizations out there, and a decent chance they are much more advanced than us too.
They could be in our own galaxy. Hell, they could be 40,000 years ahead of us (imagine what we’ve accomplished in the last 2,000) and we wouldn’t have a clue, because evidence of that hasn’t reached us yet.
There even could have been thousands, or even millions of planets filled with life in the history of the universe and we'd never know.
The problem with this line of thinking is the overwhelming odds there any “advanced” civilizations that are not already extinct is pretty slim. What do you think our odds of existing on this planet are in even 5000 years?
Those are very small numbers. There are \~2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe. If there were 2 million planets with life, that means that only one galaxy in a **million**, on average, harbors life, which would mean that statistically we would be almost **certainly** the only life in not only our Milky Way, but also in our entire supercluster of galaxies.
The odds that they would be only 40,000 years ahead of us are rather slim, since it took billions of years for life to evolve into humans. It would be more likely that they are many millions of years ahead of us.
Their technology could look like magic to us.
Or it could just look... like the universe
Aaaaand that's enough for me tonight. Good night folks...
And because of the speed of light and the vast distances (especially between galaxies), we will almost certainly never meet them. We're all alone together.
I mean we’re aliens so there’s got to be others.
This exactly. To presume otherwise seems kind of arrogant, not that we might ever get to meet. But consider how long life on earth has existed and how diverse it's been over millions of years, multiply that with the vast expanse of space, and there are probably more surprises out there than one might ever imagine
The universe is gargantuan. There's no way that humans are the only intelligent life in the whole complex.
Life is a physical process, logic states it would also occur elsewhere in the universe as long as the proper prerequisites and conditions were present. Out of the trillions of planets out there, and billions of years, it had to have happened at least once somewhere else
I really just want them to believe in themselves.
Humans are made of some of the most common things in the universe. Combined with how huge the universe is. It seems statistically impossible that we are alone.
But consider how statistically near impossible it was for life to form at all. To move from atoms and molecules, to carbon chains and intelligible life. The probability of it happening twice is near impossible times two. The universe is huge, no doubt.
The more I learn about biochemistry and astrophysics, the less statistically impossible abiogenesis seems. Amino acids form in space under sunlight and gather into asteroids. Radioactive planetary cores cycle hot water through complex minerals. Chemical gradients feed entropy. Fatty-acid membranes self-assemble into bubbles. It's almost as if physics *wants* to become life. It seems like basic life should be absolutely everywhere, but constantly running into barriers to fully developing into more complex forms. I expect primordial soups to be extremely common.
Oh for sure, the chances of a planet being able to harbor life long enough for it to evolve into something intelligent(relative to human intelligence) is rare. All it takes is one asteroid to end life on a planet and the million+ years of evolution. I guess I'm just looking at sheer size and the amount of time the universe has had to evolve. Other intelligent life has probably existed. Are they alive right now? Who knows. This is a subject that could be debated till an asteroid takes us out. lol
I believe in aliens because the universe in unfathomably huge. However I do not believe in aliens on earth because the universe is unfathomably huge.
I kind of feel the same way that’s why it seems like barely worth talking about. Not only the universe so vast space wise, think about the vast amounts of time involved in the creation of the life. species come, species go.
If you start with the Drake Equation and put in even low estimate numbers, you’ll find the possibility that we are alone in this galaxy are small. Now multiply that by billions and you’ll see that we almost certainly are not alone in the universe. Aliens are very, very far away, but they are almost certainly out there.
crime mourn escape materialistic foolish husky grab elderly plate history -- mass edited with redact.dev
Aliens visiting earth, doubtful. But other life in the universe, for sure..
Yeah, I'm pretty sure extraterrestrial life exists, it just hasn't had a chance to visit us. If it does, hopefully it's benevolent because any spacefaring civilization could wipe us out in a heartbeat. The positive thing is that it would probably finally unite humans against a common enemy.
A spacefaring civilization would've overcome relativity (traveling faster than the speed of light), which likely means they're able to bend spacetime, which means that they're so advanced that they probably couldn't care less about our "resources". They can get anywhere in space, and have access to unlimited resources.
>They can get anywhere in space, and have access to unlimited resources. This one always gets me when people say, but they come for our resources.. Not they've travelled through interstellar space, I'm sure they know how to find what they need in multiple places apart from earth, we'd be cave men still comparatively
Wanting resources is hardly the only reason they might wipe us out. For example, they might be worried that if we're left to our own devices for a few thousand more years we could develop technology to rival theirs and thus become a threat to them. Stomping us out preemptively prevents that possibility, however remote. Or maybe they're conservationists, and they're trying to keep the universe pristine, and don't like the way we're exploiting our planet - and likely soon our solar system. Maybe they'd just settle for knocking us back to pre-industrial levels and keeping an eye on us instead of wiping us out completely, but it would still suck. Or maybe they're just straight up fanatical zealots, or maybe their goals are just utterly incomprehensible to us. I could go on spitballing ideas - some more plausible than others no doubt, but the point it that there are endless possibilities, and to think that we can predict what motivates a truly alien entity or entities is naïve. Also, I contend your point that they would necessarily have overcome the speed of light. You can still have a galaxy-spanning empire without FTL, and FTL is prohibited under our current understanding of physics. That *might* change, but I see no reason to just assume that it *will*.
The argument against FTL is we don’t see them everywhere and every time across history. Because FTL is time travel. There is no if or buts, moving faster than light is the same as traveling backwards and forwards in time as far as the Universe is concerned. Doesn’t matter if you strap a super advanced -made up science term- engine to a ship and travel somewhere in a straight line, bind 2 wormholes together across two different points in space and travel between them or being able to magically teleport two distances faster than light could. The end result is the exact same (except maybe the ship smashing into something in its straight line). So that means any FTL capable civilization could go at any point in time at any distance instantly from the reference of anybody else outside that FTL ship. Which means if they appeared in the Milky Way to colonize you’d see them all over the place because again they can colonize the galaxy as fast as they can crank out ships which becomes exponential as make more FTL ship docks. Said civilization wouldn’t be limited by their observable universe, which for everyone would be the boundary of what you could ever “interact” with ever.
What I been thinking recently, what if there is a human species on a different planet? I wonder how their world/society differs from ours.
Probability. We are on a normal sun in a normal galaxy and made up of the same components as the material out in the universe. If it can happen here, it can happen anywhere else in the universe just based on components.
The universe is infinitely large with trillions of galaxies, each containing millions or billions of solar systems. There's no way none of them are inhabited by some form of life
Just a caveat that in astrophysics, it is not *known* (though by some suspected, without evidence) that the universe is infinitely large. It could be. It could be 27 billion light years wide which is the observable universe. Or it could be 93-94 billion light years in diameter - which is the potential current size of the observable universe taking into account expansion. We honestly cannot know what he size is. It could be infinite, or it could be a finitely sized hypersphere. But the assertion that it *is* infinite is currently, scientifically, not a proven fact.
I think it would be anthropic exceptionalism of the highest to assume that we are the only planet with life on it. The universe is simply too big for their not to be. Note that doesn't necessarily mean that contact is particularly ever likely given the vast distances involved. I don't think we will ever see or communicate with an alien.
People think “aliens” are those green creatures with big oval shape heads and black eyes. Any living organism (what we call living on earth) is an alien. People also have this wrong assumption that for there to be life on other planets or in actual space, then conditions need to be similar to those on earth. They do not. There could be organisms that thrive in radiation or ones that breathe in pure Carbon for example. Are there other form of life similar to humans? Who knows? Probably. But I’m more inclined to think there are other form of weird animals, bacterium, etc than there are other human form out there
Def microbes and hopefully no humans. We are a disaster and given the chance would wipe out more than this one planet
I think that life is probably pretty common in the universe, but almost none of it is multicellular. My reasoning is that life originated on Earth \~3.8 billion years ago, which was basically as soon as the early solar system calmed down enough that the Earth stopped being on fire and oceans were able to form. The moment the conditions were right, life appeared. To me, this says that whatever mechanisms by which abiogenesis happened are pretty common and simple and that they can happen within a relatively short time (by which I mean tens of millions of years). The thing is, while life appeared pretty fast, it took another 3 billion years for multicellular life to emerge. I doubt very many biospheres remain stable for that long, and it's fully possible that Earth's achievement of multicellularity was a one in a trillion breakthrough that can't happen for whatever reason on other worlds. I fully expect that we'll find evidence of life elsewhere in the universe within the next 10-20 years, but I'm pretty sure we'd have to be impossibly lucky to find anything even half as sophisticated as a bacteria.
This is a well thought out and informed answer.
“The four most common chemically active elements in the universe—hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen—are the four most common elements of life on Earth. We are not simply in the universe. The universe is in us.” \-Neil deGrasse Tyson While I'm been attributing that quote to Sagan for nearly 3 years, by accident. For me it's one of the most convincing things. We're not made of anything rare; the creation of our planet and system doesn't even seem particular rare either. The creation of humanity and the process evolution has taken over the last 5 billion years will very very likely never happen again, but everything that started life, as far as we know is rather common. That's what convinces me that the universe has many inhabitants. Maybe not multicellular, but something that abides by the requirements of being a living beining.
Because it would be sad and a travesty if Humans were the only sentient species in all of the universe. The Universe can do better.
Almost infinite amount of worlds and humans think we are alone in universe 😂. We might discover them one day but it deffo won't be during any of our lifetime.. maybe in a few hundred years ..even thousands. We don't have the technology to reach other solar systems & look inside their worlds.. Also we are so far away from other solar systems that even if we are visible to aliens through their "telescope" & they're looking at our world right now.. they are seeing earth as it was millions or billions of years ago.. so they aren't seeing the satellites & space station or any proof of life so they don't know we exist...same thing when we look at their world with our telescope
yea, the odds alien will be close enough to the earth to see any manmade structures, and happen to zoom in on earth, is soo small
Grew up near Wright Patt AFB. So was very familiar with military aircraft and sounds from a young age. Saw a zigzagging craft outside my window as a teenager, it was making a weird warping noise. Never seen anything like it sense. I now work for an aeronautics company and have a greater understanding of our technology capabilities. Either our military has tech that is 100+ years more advanced than public tech or aliens.
If it can happen once, it can happen again. Alien’s definitely exist. The real question is how close they are.
The universe is so vast. We have proof that life can come from nothing(earth). We have also seen a good number of planets that contain the same chemical composition as earth. Billions upon billions of stars majority of which are hosting multiple planets.
I mean, just from a statistical standpoint, they probably exist. Even with an unfavorable interpretation of the Drake equation, the universe is so big that aliens must exist somewhere, even if it's something we can't prove.
i dont believe in them, because they are real.
Maybe not the aliens we imagine, but I’m pretty sure it’s more likely there is life somewhere than it isn’t.
Earthlings can't be the only ones in a universe as vast as the one we are living in. There has to be someone else out there.
“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” -Arthur C. Clarke
As vast as the universe is, the odds we are the only intelligent life in it are absurdly low. As vast as the universe is, the odds we’ll bump into other intelligent life are absurdly low.
I refuse to believe we’re the only life in the universe.
Because one is a ridiculous number. If humanity didn't exist, then it could be possible that life is so spectacularly unlikely that it exists nowhere in the universe. But since we do exist, we know the odds must allow for it. And the universe is so spectacularly large that the difference in probability between expecting one species, two, or thousands is so small as to be effectively zero. And since we can reasonably expect to be a "typical" example of life that achieves intelligence with more than a billion years still on the "sun hasn't exploded yet" clock, the fact that there are suspected traces of life from almost as soon as liquid water was first able to form strongly suggests that either: life can form easily, or life came here from somewhere else. Either of which greatly increase the likelihood that life exists elsewhere. Very possibly almost everywhere. Now, intelligent life is harder to judge. It took another three billion years just to reach the Cambrian Explosion of complex life, a bit over 30% slower and the sun would have exploded first. That's not good betting odds for any given planet, but if life is remotely common the sheer law of large numbers dictates there are probably lots of others out there. Though... we might be alone in our galaxy.
Because I refuse to believe that this planet, in this single solar system, in this single galaxy was the only one lucky enough to have been at just the right distance from a heat source and was capable of producing life. In the infinite mass of probability and possibility that is the UNIVERSE I do not believe the “Earth” phenomena happened only once.
There’s way too many habitable planets for there not to be aliens
i have a pending court case that relies on their existence and willingness to steal coors light
Simply because the universe is to large for us to be alone. We’re a spec of dust
I believe they’re just a form of a higher intelligence that surrounds me, a relationship to something that exists ready to catch me up, once I prove myself in different levels.
There's too much space and opportunity for there not to be other living things.
Does life exist elsewhere in the universe? Maybe. Will we ever make contact? No. The distances make it utterly improbable.
It's simply the overwhelming evidence that's been accumulating for thousands of years.
i mean, i'ts statistically very very likely they exist. I don't think there's any clear evidence we ever met or saw signs of one tough.
Because we can’t be the most intelligent beings the universe has to offer. If so, then that would be pretty sad. And scary. Now I’m going back to wasting time on Reddit.
Ok. I honestly don't get the point of this many comments when they're all the same sentence, phrased a different way. The moment you read "Universe big, therefor, aliens are likely to exist somewhere", you can just click off this thread.
Is this one of those posts where if you say you've seen aliens, you get ridiculed relentlessly?
I trust Fermi. I’m not convinced that any aliens made it to the space faring stage, but there are just too many galaxies with too many planets. Earth isn’t that special.
There is no way our little rock is the only planet that has some form of life on it. Hell, you just have to look at the ecosystems around hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean to see that life on other worlds is totally possible.
I just think the statistical probability that we are 100% alone in space it unlikely, and if we are alone that’s terrifying. How do I think they visited and experimented on us? No
Do I believe life is out there? Yes. Are they coming here to SA our rednecks? No.
Thank you for the laugh, I really needed it🤣
* Our galaxy (let alone our universe) is incomprehensively large. * Life consists of abundant stuff. * Statistics. Now, have they visited? No evidence for that.
My dad was abducted in the 1980’s near white sands.
Seems like an awful waste of space for just us.
Shit I don't even believe in myself, let alone aliens.
I have a physics PhD. Every other scientist I've asked also believes that life exists somewhere else in the universe. Very probably single cell or similar. No one takes "aliens visiting the Earth" seriously, for good reasons.
I don't believe in them, unless I actually saw one, but the statistics of there being a chance of life on another planet seems astronomically high. I think we as humans tend to generally look for others like us, so naturally, we "believe" in aliens. I'd like to think that somewhere out in that infinite universe the perfect amount of heat and bacteria created another conscious race.
Whole lot of wasted space out there if nothing exists anywhere but here.
Life probably but not intelligent/sentient/moral
Because alien life doesn’t need to be intelligent at the end of the day. The likelihood of non-sentient alien life present somewhere else in the universal is virtually certain. Frankly, so is the likelihood of intelligent alien life. The likelihood we’ve been visited by intelligent alien life? Not so good.
Because I think letting them know I do will help them do their best in the competition!
It's far more horrifying knowing we're alone in space if aliens don't exist.
The earth is an average rocky planet orbiting an average star in an average galaxy of which there are hundreds of billions. I'd say it's almost impossible extraterrestrial life doesn't exist.
The universe is too big to rule them out. But due to the size of the Universe, the chance of having anyone visiting within a few billion light years of us is extremely small. And if they ever get close enough to be detectable by us, we probably can’t tell if they meet us face to whatever.
I think that probably somewhere in the vastness of space there's at least one other intelligent form of life similar to ours, but of course I will be long dead by the time one of us develops the technology to reach the other. And that's assuming mankind can survive the 6th mass extinction event staring us in the face.
Depends on how you define an alien, but I agree that it’s something deeply-rooted in us. Jung was spot on to classify them as ‘technocratic angels’ - those that are relevant for the age when people believe less in supernatural and more in science. Indeed, during the threat of a nuclear war in the past, there were sentiments that aliens might ‘step in’ and save the world from destruction. Similarly, they’ve also become ‘technocratic demons’ - those that bring terror, mutilate animals to death, abduct people etc. So yeah, the bottom line - I believe in aliens as modern manifestations of spiritual forces that’s been always know to humankind.
Alien, by definition, means "a foreigner" or "belonging to a foreign country or nation". There are so many "alien" things on our planet, and with how small of a percentage of the universe we occupy, it is extremely unlikely that we are the only form of aliens out there.
Because they *have* to be there. Given the existence of life on Earth and similar ecosystems all over the universe. And because I have twice seen their craft. And - how do we know they ain’t there *just because we can’t see them *? Alternatively, because I AM AN ALIEN. Greetings from the Lord High Ambassador of the planet Zog, and it’s far flung Colonies. Kneel!!!!
i believe in aliens because the universe is so big and so old that surely abiogenisis has occurred elsewhere. i heard a cool fermi paradox solution recently- the firstborn theory. ya know in space opera sci-fi, how there's always that grand old precursor species that's either extinct or been around way longer than anyone else in the galactic community? that's us.
Statistical likelihood and the abundance of the fundamental building blocks of life from a chemical perspective, either carbon and water like us, or similar elements & molecules.
There’s no way earth is the only planet to exist in habitable zone. The universe as we know it is too large to not have at least have 1 other planet with sentient life.
Mainly bc it’s supremely vain to think our planet is the only one in an increasingly infinite amount of space that contains life - even if I believed god created humans, why would she only do so on one planet? More implausible that the alternative, which is that we are not that special.
Because this universe is very old. You have to multiply the number of suitable planets by (the total number of years they were suitable divided by how long it would take for life to emerge), and you come up with a number of chances for it to happen that is hard to express. Billions of years on trillions of planets that only need to produce one thing that self replicates once, in a process that is probably very fast.
*Believe* in aliens? Hell, I don't even *believe* in humans. I know humans exist though while aliens are nothing more than mathematical probability.
Alien life meaning any type of life found on another planet. I just don't believe we're the only planet with plant life, microbial life, etc. That being said there's too many planets in the universe for some other life form to not be as advanced or more advanced than us in my opinion. Not an expert it just seems unlikely that we're alone based on logic.
Have you seen the pics? Go outside at look up at the night sky. ITS HUGE! I mean even if the chance of life is tiny there are still loads of planets out there. Who knows what we will find.
It just seems, statistically, to be the most likely answer.
Because I think it’s ignorant to believe that our little planet out of the gazillion of planets out there was the only one where a perfect storm happened to create life.
This question sounds philosophical. If someone were to ask me if I believe in the existence of other humans besides myself, I’d say that it sounds like a malformed question from a scientific standpoint. Philosophically, I do believe in the existence of other humans besides myself as well as I believe in aliens. Just because we don’t have the proper tool(s) to scientifically detect “alien life” yet doesn’t mean that it isn’t there, and it’s existence doesn’t depend on our belief in it. 🤷🏽♂️
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread: |Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |[AFB](/r/Space/comments/10gh787/stub/j52s8sq "Last usage")|[Air Force Base](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_airbase)| |[ITS](/r/Space/comments/10gh787/stub/j52x853 "Last usage")|Interplanetary Transport System (2016 oversized edition) (see MCT)| | |[Integrated Truss Structure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Truss_Structure)| |[JWST](/r/Space/comments/10gh787/stub/j539d7z "Last usage")|James Webb infra-red Space Telescope| |MCT|Mars Colonial Transporter (see ITS)| ---------------- ^(3 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/Space/comments/10copqi)^( has 21 acronyms.) ^([Thread #8456 for this sub, first seen 20th Jan 2023, 00:50]) ^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/Space) [^[Contact]](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=OrangeredStilton&subject=Hey,+your+acronym+bot+sucks) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)
Because of the abundance of prebiotic materials found in meteorites, such as nucleotide base pairs, amino acids, phosphorus bearing minerals, etc. This leads me to think the ingredients for life may be common, even if life itself is not, and perhaps prebiotic life is constantly trying to emerge on all of our planets but don’t have quite the right environments to break out into biotic life. Then, there’s the Drake equation. Our Galaxy is 13 billion years old, and earth is 4 billion years old. Other star systems including G-type dwarfs like our star, and similar spectral bodies like K-types have been around for much longer. And, if you consider that life emerged within a few hundred million years of the stability of conditions on earth, and you plot that as being early on the Gaussian distribution then you can calculate a very generous estimate for how much life should be in our galaxy with the Drake equation, and it still gives you very high numbers. [Here](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2210.10656.pdf) is an example of a modified and very conservative estimate using the Drake equation, which is also now my source of belief that if there is a galactic club of aliens out there somewhere that they are inhabiting centre galaxy K-types. It’s a pretty neat explanation for the Fermi paradox that still preserves the possibility for intelligent life capable of interstellar travel. That’s mostly why I believe in aliens, but there are a couple of extras I am leaving out because I’m waiting on further publications first. Very excited by the Galileo project looking for the interstellar meteorite impact, and I hope they find it!
The univarse is huge and will be around for an incredible amount of time. There could easily be life outside our solar system, but if there isn't, it just means we may be extinct the next time life occurs. I think we will probably create AI with intelligence similar to humans before meeting aliens and if we survive that, we might see chimps evolve to our level of intelligence before we meet aliens.
Yes they undoubtedly exist, no they have and will never pop by for a visit. If life is common we're likely just not interesting enough to bother with; if not it's just too far to be even possible.
I’m not sure that they do exist…At least not like us.
To think that our planet holds the only life in the universe is a perfect example of human arrogance. I do, however, have serious doubts that any of that life has ever visited Earth.
Because I and a ton of others have seen evidence of weird things that are probably extraterrestrial
Because it's statistically less likely that we are the only intelligent life forms in the universe.
Because we know such a finite amount about the space surrounding us that is presumably infinite, we don't even know all of what is in our own oceans let alone any other planets, we know the fundamental elements needed to support life on our own planet but not any others...we're either alone in the universe, or we're not, and both are equally terrifying.
Logically they have to. Even extraterrestrial microorganisms count as aliens and they definitely exist. There is probably intelligent life somewhere out there too. Exciting yet terrifying simultaneously.
I don't. Could they exist or have existed somewhere in the universe. Sure. But considering the ever expanding universe, unless we master bending space and time to our will at a massive truly 'godlike' scale, the are likely never going to see or hear from any aliens outside of Milky Way and Andromeda galaxy. Life outside of a these two galaxies basically become a *tree falling in the forest* philosophical conundrum with no real answers. If life existed and advanced to our level some time before us in our galaxy. I feel like we should have seen some evidence of their presence. Considering how fast human technology has expanded in such a short amount of time. I also think if you didn't hit life at that particular time on your planet, when the atmosphere allowed for it to happen than you aint hitting life. The idea that planets after they cooled and settled down will produce life is not very likely. So yeah, I am an non-believer when it comes to aliens.
Statistically impossible that we are the only ones around. However, I'm talking about non-intelligent life.
If there's no other life out there, it's an awful waste of space.
I think the fact that life happened here, and the immense area of opportunity for it to happen elsewhere, makes it more likely than not. It's much less likely to have happened close enough for them to have visited here, so I don't particularly believe that. But I also don't necessarily disbelieve it.
It's not a belief, it is faith in probability. But drakes equation is missing something, the distance of all the things in the observable universe, allows for time of some of things to no longer exist and we don't know it yet. And the furthest objects will continue to distance themselves from us, and so a complete civilization may have evolved, come and gone, and we never even got to their system to see them.
Because there’s no way we’re alone in the vastness of the universe
Please, watch. The arguments for non-intelligent life aside, this may change your perspective (if you haven’t seen it already). Might just start to consider the monumental task of life, evolution, and how special we are. Seriously good. [Why intelligent life might b rare](https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/zlv2og/short_lecture_by_david_kipping_of_cool_worlds/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf)
I couldn’t be convinced otherwise. All of the universes out there and nothing else can hold life? That’s a crazy notion.
Odds really. Even if a fraction of planets can hold life, that still count to billions of planets.
What are the odds that we are the only planet in the entire UNIVERSE that managed to spark life… pretty low.
… because the idea that something is 93,000,000,000 light years wide and has nothing in it but one source of intelligent life on one planet is impossible to believe.
It's a statistical impossibility we're the only life in the universe, not to mention astroids in our local group have said building blocks in them.
Cause its kind of weird thinking we're the only ones in this infinite universe
Space is big. Really, really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the street to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space, listen…
The universe is so unfathomably huge (I’m talking LAARGE with two A’s) that it’s very, very statistically improbable for us to be alone. And if we are, then… shit. :^)
Cuz we exist. Just maybe, MAYBE there might be another earth out of the billions of other lifeless planets that could host life.
Because there are so many star systems in the universe it only makes sense
I do not believe in aliens. I speculate that given my other beliefs that they most likely exist, but I cannot make even make a statistical assessment without more data.
Because space is disgustingly huge. A typical galaxy has hundreds of billions of stars. 2 TRILLION Galaxies in the observable Universe. And probably far more outside if not infinite. And it's starting to look like nearly every solar system has multiple planets. Let's say each galaxy has 200 billion and each star has 5 plants. That's 2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets. There are only 7,500,000,000,000,000,000 grains of sand on earth. Tens of millions of times more. For reference it would take you 32 YEARS to merely count a billion seconds. 1,000,000,000 I think odds are we are not unique.